I have lately been feeling like the Grim Reaper is lurking somewhere near again. Can I whip him in a game of chess again? Debatable.
Derfentwinkle, the Necromancer’s Apprentice, turned out to be a good student.
As a teacher, I have always been one of those who sincerely believes,
You must never give up on any student. They all can learn. They are all worth teaching.
And reflecting on that philosophy, in spite of the fact that I have been having a hard time getting things done and writing very little, I should not give up on myself.
I am not yet done telling my story. There is more to do, and more life to live.
Here’s the book about a teacher who doesn’t give up on a student and is proven right the hard way.
Up until now I have been doing little but writing stories and working on getting a lot of them into a published form. Admittedly a self-published form. For the most part, I am the only reader who knows how good my writing is. Well, there’s an editor from I-Universe who thinks I am as good as many authors on the best-seller lists. Not better than… as good as. And the editorial and marketing staff at PDMI Publishing (a publisher now out of business for over eight years) know how good my novel Snow Babies is. And a lot of nudists here, in England, in France, and in Germany know how good Recipes for Gingerbread Children is. But my reputation is tiny and the splash I have made is limited to puddles.
If the literary agent I have been talking to actually gets my book Catch a Falling Star republished by a major publishing house, things will change for the better. However, the current marketplace still puts most of the burden on the authors to promote and make their books succeed. The only difference would be having an agent on my side instead of me doing it all with no one on my side.
Most of the best writing I have done includes strongly realized female characters. Particularly Valerie Clarke, the female protagonist of Snow Babies. Good writing builds on previous writing. I may have already written the best things I am capable of writing. But as I continue to write, I can deepen characters that already have been established. And I can add new ones. For example, the character depicted in the Paffooneys of this post is Charlotte Robbins. She is a complex young lady with an anger management problem. She is also Valerie Clarke’s hated rival, one who beats her out for head cheerleader, but only because Valerie quits cheerleading in her senior year. She is destined to become Valerie’s best friend somehow in the course of my manuscript He Rose on a Golden Wing.
Of course, none of that happens if one of my health problems croaks me before my 70th birthday. I don’t mean to end on a downward note when everything has been looking up. But there it is, in spite of myself.
After a year-long post-Covid publishing drought, I am back in the page-making storyteller business once again. This post is about recent publication accomplishments, evidencing some pride in a comeback.
The poetry book is finished and will be published within a month (knock on wood, barring sudden unexpected death, prison time, or Armaggedon battles.) I have never thought of myself as a poet. But now I seriously think of myself as one of the worst poets in the history of the world.
This book was my only appearance on a best-seller list anywhere at any time as it made the number one spot on Amazon’s hottest-selling newly published books on two separate days in its first week of publication. It is about nudism and naturism, so it is the nudist community on X, formerly Twitter, that I have to thank for its achievement.
This book, the 4th in the AeroQuest series was published just this month, and it has already sold two copies and a whole bunch of KENP pages read. It has been a couple of years since book 3 of this series, so some readers have been waiting for it for a while.
This book, published during the pandemic has also been getting attention from readers, making it the most popular title on my author’s page.
And this book, a fairytale, is the most ignored book I have recently published. I think it is an excellent comedy adventure that even has some illustrations with nude fairies in them. But nothing is ever truly sure-fire.
I am now hoping that the interest in my books will begin to really pick up. I am talking to an agent for the first time about my book, Catch a Falling Star. I could actually be going places this time.
With Gyro driving, a rather unnerving prospect for those riding with him, the first pink Cadillacko swooped down on the planet Cornucopea out of the clouds. They were supposed to be establishing a base camp on the planet.
Besides Gyro, the Nebulon boy who gave the first Cadillacko its air bubble field and its silly Nebulonin nickname, the grav speeder held Billy Iowa, wearing his cowboy sombrero and leather moccasins, Luigi the Onion Guy, for whom they had no workable space suit, and Mai Ling, scantily dressed in form-fitting battle armor and wearing the ring-sleeve device that could amplify her telekinetic throwing arm.
The second Cadillacko carried Hassan Parker, who had to wear a full space suit instead of being nude like usual, Taffy King and Shu Kwai, all suited and combat ready.
The third grav speeder carried Ged Aero-sensei, Junior Aero, his adopted Nebulon nephew, and Sara Smith, the strongest telepath and healer of the group.
The drop zone looked like a field of flowers undulating in a high wind. But as they zoomed closer, you could see the large daisy-heads and thistle-heads were all ripping into and damaging the other plants.
“What do we do, Sensei?” Billy radioed through the comm dot on his neck.
“Clear the landing zone. Weed-killer weapons and mowers! We have to cut the weeds down to size.”
Gyro, being Gyro, nose-dived the pink-and-white Space Cadillac into the soft dirt of the field of fighting flowers. It plowed a deep furrow in a semi-circle in the middle of the large open space. Shu-Kwai landed his gray-and-white Space Cadillac much more gently beside it.
The telekinetics, Shu and Taffy King, leaped out of their vehicle with weapons that were more like chainsaws than the lawnmowers they were supposed to be. Each had two, one controlled by each hand. So, four flying blades whirled through the air, slicing and dicing, turning Throckpods into salad.
Mai-ling leaped out with a razor pistol in her hand. She fired round throwing-star-like objects in groups of five, then whipped the blades through the air sawing thorns neatly off of every violent flower-person she saw.
Hassan manned the spray-gun with the toxic weed-killer in it, spraying withering death upon Throckpods to a range of fifty feet.
Soon an army of violent flowers was reduced to smoking piles of flower-chips and salad-squares.
By the time Ged-sensei and Sara and Junior disembarked from their pink-and-white Cadillac, the battle was already over.
Luigi the Onion Guy came bouncing furiously across the field to confront Ged.
“nO! Oh, nO! You muSt nOt spILl, ChloroPhyll!” he shouted in his weird little Onion-guy accent.
“But you wanted help in driving away to evil Throckpods and their master, did you not?”
Luigi just stank out a lot of foul smells that the translator couldn’t begin to translate. It is well known that bad words are more a matter of disgustingly figurative language that does not translate well to beings who have no reference for flower emotions, flower body parts, flower behavior, or flower-based bad thoughts.
“Luigi is swearing at you, Sensei,” Gyro tried to explain while adjusting the translator’s many translation-equivalents adjustment bars.
“We need to understand him better. Can anyone read his mind?”
Sara looked at Ged with a sorrowful expression on her face. “I am beginning to sense some of the stronger emotions coming from plant-minds. He is upset because to them, all flower-life is sacred, including the Throckpods. That’s what he wants us to cure about the Throckpods. Their leader makes them render and kill other plant-life sacrilegiously.”
“Very well, then. We will set up base-camp in this cleared field and try hard to understand these flower-people better.”
“Yes, we need to study them and do some research,” said Hassan Parker. “I can get out of this space suit and start research immediately as the rest of you set up the camp.”
“I think I have seen enough of your naked body. And you really should join us in the physical labor before doing the mental work.” Shu Kwai was not making suggestions. He was issuing commands. “And while we are here, everybody wears protective body coverings. There are many unknown plant-based dangers here, and we want no one to be at risk.”
So, eight student ninjas, their ninja sensei, and one irate Onion began building a base camp.
It’s not easy being green…. the color of so many ordinary things…
Especially as you grow older.
Because green is the color of growth and youth and life. But those things seem beyond the grasp of your outstretched fingers on your spotty and wrinkled old hand.
I am definitely no longer green like Littlebit, the Oceanian ship’s boy from the seas of Talislanta and the pirate ship, Black Dragon.
And, yes, an Iowa boy living as far away from an ocean as you can get in the United States, in all directions, you are bound to dream of pirate ships and the high seas, especially when you’re twelve and your favorite book is Treasure Island.
But now that you are old, green is more often your color because you don’t feel well… again… every day….
B
But there is still bright green in dreams.
You can still go there and be a child again in memories and your imagination.
It’s just that now the green is written down in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and cantos.
And talking to your kids about movies, art and artists, stories and writers of stories…
Did you know the favorite color of all three of my children is green?
I have known it since they were small and I could sing to them songs by Kermit the Frog, like “Rainbow Connections” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”
And with paint, you make green by combining the blue of sadness with the yellow of sunshine and happiness.
I am not ashamed to claim I enjoy reading and writing in the sunshine without anything but a hat. I wish I could’ve done that today, but there was no sunshine, the privacy fence had a huge hole in it, and the weather was too cold. Ah, the problems with being a nudist in the city.
She made that barrette with the paper flower on it. So, she’s talented. Her mother hates that top and how much bare midriff it shows off, but she went to the mall with her sweater on, and then made the sweater disappear. So, she’s also sneaky.
They are not sisters. But they do look alike, dress alike, and style their hair alike. But they are not even sorority sisters. They are in a high school prep school with a strict uniform dress code which they all break alike. That’s sorta like sisters, isn’t it?
The girl who drives that old, classic yellow cat also shops for yellow dresses and yellow shoes. But if you ask her, her favorite color is blue.
She wears only white in the food court and looks like an angel, and will not even drink much of that milkshake so it doesn’t mess up her dress or upper lip with even a hint of chocolate as she waits for that gangster thug who is her boyfriend. But if you think she’s too good for him, like she does, you don’t know what evil plans she has to manipulate and exploit him and eventually make him cry like a baby. She’s much more dangerous than he is.
I like to try to capture what people really look like the best that I can. Using digital tools has the advantage of allowing me to correct the little flubs that spoil a drawing and are only permanent once you commit pen, pencil, or paint to paper. I can alter digital works hundreds of times to get it right. I often save numerous alternate versions of the drawings because each has its own charms and problems. The AI Mirror program I use to edit the work overlays a filter on top of my original drawing. Here I have used a basic anime style. It takes care of mistakes like not aligning facial features properly enough, not wrapping shadows around shapes believably, and gradually blending color the way I used to do with oil paints. But it also does anime things I don’t particularly like such as unnaturally shrinking the nose and the mouth, making the eyes look crossed when looking straight out of the picture, and making chins unnaturally pointy. And the program will also magnify my own poor choices. I made the pupils in the eyes too small here, giving the poor girl snake-like eyes. I tried to capture the character evident in her hair styling but only gave her uncombed and messy spots on her head. I did not round off her chin enough to make the AI leave it alone. The shadows in the right eye look too dark to me, and the only visible ear seems too large. The portrait does not look like the model because I never quite see the je ne sais quoi that highlights the features that truly say who this person is to people who know her. It seems too generic to satisfy me. Of course, in addition to arthritis, glaucoma and color blindness, I was also fighting a runny nose while drawing this one.
None of what I have said here is probably interesting to you unless you also draw pictures of people, And even then you are probably laughing at my silly struggles, but I like talking about such things even to people who are not listening.
In the 1960’s back in Iowa, family reunions started happening around this time of year. We would make long treks to distant parts like Spencer, Iowa or Coralville, Iowa to meet with cousins by the dozens, with Great Aunts and their great families… people we looked somewhat like and were actually related to, but usually didn’t see more than twice in any given year. And there were some who lived in far off Cleveland, Ohio that you only saw twice in the entire decade. And it isn’t real easy to play with the kids you are related to but don’t see every day. Squabbles happen more often than not. What was the solution to that kind of warfare? According to Great Aunt Marie, the solution was a nice piece of peach pie. The offending cousin and I would each get a slice of the solution to eat side by side. Aunt Marie always had peach pie for family gatherings. She learned to make them exquisitely when they lived in Texas in the 1940’s.
Now that I live in Texas myself, and the governor of Texas, the heir to Emperor Rick Perry, the estimable Republican Prince Gregg Abbott, has declared that we can’t risk letting Syrian refugees into our State because, out of the thousands seeking refuge from violence and murder, one or two might be terrorists, I am reminded of the way Aunt Marie taught peace with a piece of peach pie. The alliteration was glorious, and the sweetness lingered long after you had eaten your share. Why can’t we offer the Syrians a little peach pie?
The Syrians (actually less than one percent of them, ISIS is not a majority of Syrians or Muslims either one) hate Texans for the same reason they hate the French in Paris. We are dropping bombs on their homes. Texans went out of their way to insult the Prophet Mohammed by hosting a hate cartoon contest and exhibition in Garland, at the event center next door to the high school where I used to teach. You have to expect squabbles from people you treat like that. And I am not saying that we don’t need to fear folks like the two terrorists who died in a shootout with Garland police as they tried to attack the insult-the-prophet event with guns. But those two guys were not from Syria. They came from Arizona. By rights, we should have Governor Abbott refusing to allow refugees of any kind from Arizona to enter our State. Especially since he is a vocal advocate of their right to openly carry firearms even into restaurants.
I want to give a piece of peach pie to each of the little refugee kids with big, brown, terror-filled eyes. They haunt my dreams. Their only desire is to escape the people trying to kill them and blowing up their homes. Peach pie makes it better. Aunt Marie is in heaven now, but if you could ask her, she’d tell you, “You should teach to each peace with a piece of peach pie.”
Catch a Falling Star 